Part 5 (1/2)
”In the midst of the civil commotions, Charles I. made several visits to Raglan Castle, and was entertained with becoming magnificence. The marquis not only declined all offers of remuneration, but also advanced large sums; and when the king thanked him for the loans, replied, Sir, I had your word for the money, but I never thought I should be so soon repayed; for now you have given me thanks, I have all I looked for.” At another time, the king, apprehensive lest the stores of the garrison should be consumed by his suite, empowered him to exact from the country such provisions as were necessary for his maintainance and recruit, ”I humbly thank your majesty,” he said, ”but my castle will not stand long if it leans on the country; I had rather be brought to a morsel of bread, than any morsels of bread should be brought me to entertain your majesty.”
The following conversation shows the amiable weakness of Charles's humanity.
Sir Trevor Williams, and four other princ.i.p.al gentlemen of Monmouths.h.i.+re, being arrested for disloyalty, and conducted to Abergavenny, the king was advised to order them to an immediate trial, which must have ended in their conviction; but Charles, moved by the tears and protestations of Trevor Williams, suffered him to be released, on bail, and committed the others only to a temporary confinement. ”The king told the marquess what he had done, and that when he saw them speak so honestly, he could not but give some credit to their words, so seconded by tears, and withal told the marquess that he had onely sent them to prison; whereupon the marquess said, what to do? to poyson that garrison? Sir, you should have done well to have heard their accusations, and then to have shewn what mercy you pleased. The king told him, that he heard that they were accused by some contrary faction, as to themselves, who, out of distaste they bore to one another on old grudges, would be apt to charge them more home than the nature of their offences had deserved; to whom the marquess made this return, Well, Sir, you may chance to gain the kingdom of heaven by such doings as these, but if you ever get the kingdom of England by such ways, I will be your bondman.”
Another conversation between the marquis and Sir Thomas Fairfax is worth relating.
”After much conference between the marquess and General Fairfax, wherein many things were requested of the general by the marquess, and being, as he thought himself, happy in the attainment, his lords.h.i.+p was pleased to make a merry pet.i.tion to the general as he was taking his leave, viz. in behalf of a couple of pigeons, who were wont to come to his hand, and feed out of it constantly, in whose behalf he desired the general that he would be pleased to give him his protection for them, fearing the little command that he should have over his soldiers in that behalf. To which the general said, I am glad to see your lords.h.i.+p so merry. Oh, said the marquess, you have given me no other cause, and hasty as you are, you shall not go untill I have told you a story.
”There were two men going up Holborn in a cart to be hanged; one of them being very merry and jocund, gave offence to the other who was sad and dejected, insomuch that the downcast man said unto the other, I wonder, brother, that you can be so frolic, considering the business we are going about. Tush, answered the other, thou art a fool; thou wentest a thieving, and never thought what would become of thee, wherefore being on a sudden surprised, thou fallest into such a shaking fit, that I am ashamed to see thee in that condition: whereas I was resolved to be hanged, before ever I fell to stealing, which is the reason nothing happenning strange or unexpected, I go so composed unto my death. So, said the marquess, I resolved to undergo whatsoever, even the worst of evils that you are able to lay upon me, before I took up arms for my sovereign, and therefore wonder not that I am so merry.”
”In the correspondence with Fairfax,” says the author of the Historical Tour, ”which preceded the capitulation, the marquis of Worcester seems to have strongly suspected that the parliament would not adhere to the conditions. His apprehensions were not groundless, for on his arrival in London he was committed to the custody of the Black Rod. He bitterly complained of this cruel usage, and deeply regretted that he had trusted himself to the mercy of the parliament. A few hours before his death, he said to Dr. Bayley, If to seize upon all my goods, to pull down my house, to fell my estate, and send up for such a weak body as mine was, so enfeebled by disease, in the dead of winter, in the winter of mine age, be merciful, what are they whose mercies are so cruel? Neither do I expect that they should stop at all this, for I fear they will persecute me after death.
”Being informed, however, that parliament would permit him to be buried in his family vault, in Windsor Chapel; he cried out, with great sprightliness of manner, Why, G.o.d bless us all, why then I shall have a better castle when I am dead, than they took from me whilst I was alive.
With so much cheerfulness and resignation did this hero expire, in the eighty-fifth year of his age.”
The second marquis was the author of that puzzling ”Century of the Names and Scantlings of such Inventions as I can at present call to mind to have tried and perfected.”
”It appears,” we are told, ”from a pa.s.sage in the Experimental Philosophy of Dr. Desaguliers, that Captain Savary derived his invention of the fire engine, since called the steam engine, from the 68th article in the Century of Scantlings; and that to conceal his original he bought up all the marquis's books, and burnt them.” The following is the ”scantling.”
”An admirable and most forcible way to drive up water by fire, not by drawing or sucking it upwards, for that must be, as the philosopher calleth it, _intra sphaeram activitatis_, which is at but such a distance. But this way hath no bounder, if the vessels be strong enough; for I have taken a piece of a whole cannon, whereof the end was burst, and filled it three quarters full of water, stopping and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the broken end, as also the touch-hole, and making a constant fire under it, within twenty-four hours it burst, and made a great crack; so that having a way to make my vessels that they are strengthened by the force within them, and the one to fill after the other, I have seen the water run like a constant fountain stream forty feet high; one vessel of water, rarified by fire, drives up forty feet of cold water. And a man that attends the work has but to turn two c.o.c.ks, that one vessel of water being consumed, another begins to force and refit with cold water, and so successfully, the fire being tended and kept constant, with the self-same person may likewise abundantly perform in the interim between the necessity of turning the said c.o.c.ks.”
We now renew our onward course, but with many a lingering look at ”delightsome Monmouth.”
CHAPTER X.
Troy House-Anecdote-Antique custom-Village Churches of Monmouths.h.i.+re-White-was.h.i.+ng-The bard-Strewing graves with flowers-St.
Briavels' Castle-Llandogo-Change in the character of the river-The Druid of the Wye-Wordsworth's ”Lines composed above Tintern Abbey.”
Just below Monmouth the Wye forms a sharp curve, the apex of which is met by the Monnow and the Trothy, in such a way that these two streams, tending to nearly the same point, but coming from different directions, and the two sides of the Wye curve, make the place resemble the meeting of four roads. We have already seen how interesting the Monnow is; the Trothy, which pa.s.ses White Castle, and has its source in the mountains near the Great Skyrrid, is hardly less so; the Wye we have followed from the summit of Plinlimmon, through a tract of mingled beauty and grandeur, unrivalled in England; and we are now about to trace its course to the monastic ruins of Tintern, and through the fairy land of Piercefield to its destined bourne, the Severn.
The banks are at first low, and the country laid out in level meadows, framed in at a short distance by swelling hills. Troy House is the first object that arrests our attention in front by its sombre woods. In the reign of James I. it was the property of Sir Charles Somerset, the brother of the gallant defender of Raglan Castle, between whom and Charles I. a conversation relating to Troy House took place, which is thus reported in the ”Apothegms.”
”Sir Thomas Somerset, brother to the marquis of Worcester, had a house which was called Troy, five miles from Ragland Castle. This Sir Thomas, being a complete gentleman, delighted much in fine gardens and orchards, where, by the benefit of art, the earth was made so gratefull to him at the same time that the king (Charles the first) happened to be at his brother's house, that it yielded him wherewithal to send him a present; and such a one as (the times and seasons considered) was able to make the king believe that the sovereign of the planets had now changed the poles, and that Wales (the refuse and outcast of the fair garden of England) had fairer and riper fruit than England's bowels had on all her beds. This present, given to the marquis, he would not suffer to be presented to the king by any other hand than his own. 'Here I present you, sir,' said the marquis, (placing his dishes on the table) 'with that which came not from Lincoln that was, nor from London that is, nor from York that is to be, but from Troy.' Whereupon the king smiled, and answered the marquis, 'Truly, my lord, I have heard that corn grows where Troy town stood, but I never thought there had grown any apricots before.'”
Some articles said to be relics of Henry V. are preserved here: the bed in which he was born, the cradle in which he was rocked, and the armour in which he fought at Agincourt. There is also a carved oak chimney-piece from Raglan Castle.
Soon the hills approach nearer, and, covered with rich foliage, sweep down more suddenly towards the river. On the right bank is Penalt church, standing on a wooded eminence; and behind it, an extensive common distinguished for a superst.i.tious custom, derived, as is supposed, from the days of the druids. When a funeral pa.s.sed that way, the cortege stopped at an oak tree, and placed the corpse on a stone seat at its foot. The company than sang a psalm, and resumed their procession. It may be remarked that wherever an old oak tree is found in this part of the country, in an insulated or otherwise remarkable situation, there is sure to be connected with it some religious tradition, or some observance whose origin is lost in antiquity. The churches are usually an interesting feature in the landscape, for it would seem as if their founders had sought purposely out for them solitary places, by the banks of rivers or in the midst of groves or fields. In general they are exceedingly simple in appearance, many having the marks of great antiquity, and almost all being whitewashed from top to bottom. An antiquary has ingeniously accounted for this peculiarity, by the custom the Normans had of constructing even large buildings of pebbles and rag-stone, which obliged them to cover the inequalities, outside and inside, by a coat of lime and sand. However this may be, the effect is not unpleasing; more especially when the rural temple, as is frequently the case, is shaped like a barn, and without a belfry. Such churches, more especially in the mountainous districts, still present the rounded arches, and other peculiarities, which denote that their rude walls were raised by our Saxon ancestors, if not by the ancient Britons themselves.
We find the white walls, so common in Wales, alluded to as a poetical circ.u.mstance by one of the bards of the fourteenth century, in a piece of considerable beauty; and in the succeeding paragraph there is an allusion to another Welsh custom, of more cla.s.sical authority, that of strewing the graves of the dead with flowers. The poem is an invocation to summer, to shed its blessings over the country of Gwent. The following is the paragraph referred to, with the second allusion, terminating the ode by an abrupt and pathetic transition.
”If I obtain thee, O summer, in thy splendid hour, with thy fair growth and thy sporting gems; thy serenity pleasantly bear, thou golden messenger, to Morganoc. With suns.h.i.+ne morn gladden thou the place, and greet the whitened houses; give growth, give the first fruits of the spring, and collect thou blossoms to the bushes; s.h.i.+ne proudly on the wall of lime, full as light and gaily bright; leave there in the vale thy footsteps in juicy herbage, in fresh attire; diffuse a load of delicious fruits, in bounteous course among its woods; give thy crop like a stream over every lawn, the meadows, and the land of wheat; clothe the orchard, the vineyard, and the garden, with thy abundance and thy teeming harvest; and scatter over its fair soil the lovely marks of thy glorious course!
”And oh! whilst thy season of flowers, and thy tender sprays thick of leaves remain; I will pluck the roses from the branches; the flowerets of the meads, and gems of the woods; the vivid trefoils, beauties of the ground, and the gaily smiling bloom of the verdant herbs, to be offered to the memory of a chief of favorite fame: Humbly I will lay them on the grave of Ivor!”
The Ivor here alluded to was Ivor Hael, or the Generons, an ancestor of the Tredgear family of Morgans, whose pedigree is traced, by the Welsh bards from the third son of Noah. The poet David, ap Gwillim, styled the Welsh Ovid, loved a lady of the name of Morvid, in whose praise his prolific muse produced no fewer than a hundred and forty-seven poems. A rich rival, however, gained the unwilling prize; and the son of song consoled himself by carrying off his lost mistress on two several occasions, when her husband, Rhys Gwgan, was with the army in France, where he served in the rank of captain at the battle of Crecy. For both these offences he was fined and imprisoned, and in both instances liberated by the gentlemen of Gwent, who came forward in a body in favour of their darling bard. The above extract is taken from one of two poems which he wrote in testimony of his grat.i.tude. It may be added, that when flowers are planted on graves, it was, and we believe is the custom to surround the area with stones, which are periodically _whitewashed_.